St. Thomas Aquinas
There is the abstraction of the contemplative, whether he is the true sort of Christian contemplative, who is contemplating Something, or the wrong sort of Oriental contemplative, who is contemplating Nothing. Obviously St. Thomas was not a Buddhist mystic; but I do not think his fits of abstraction were even those of a Christian mystic. If he had trances of true Christian mysticism, he took jolly good care that they should not occur at other people’s dinner-tables. I think he had the sort of bemused fit, which really belongs to the practical man rather than the entirely mystical man. He uses the recognized distinction between the active life and the contemplative life, but in the cases concerned here, I think even his contemplative life was an active life. It had nothing to do with his higher life, in the sense of ultimate sanctity. It rather reminds us that Napoleon would fall into a fit of apparent boredom at the Opera, and afterwards confess that he was thinking how he could get three army corps at Frankfurt to combine with two army corps at Cologne. So, in the case of Aquinas, if his daydreams were dreams, they were dreams of day; and dreams of the day of battle. If he talked to himself, it was because he was arguing with somebody else.
Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274)—Roman Catholic saint, theologian, mystic, and scholar, Aquinas was educated by Benedictine monks at Monte Cassino and at the University of Naples. He became a Dominican friar at age seventeen. He is perhaps best known for his major work, the Summa Theologiae.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)—Roman Catholic artist, poet, journalist, essayist, and author, Chesterton wrote over one hundred books. C. S. Lewis says, in Surprised by Joy, that Chesterton’s Christian apologetics had a marked impact on him, and Lewis’s own apologetic work owes a debt to Chesterton.
The Unveiling of the Fall
If we would test … that a disbelief in the Fall is really such an insidious source of spiritual weakness, we need only confine our attention to individuals, and in them study the difficulties and standpoint of the intelligent modern mind. If conversation is not hampered by restraint their outlook upon Christianity will usually be found to be mistaken from the beginning. They are not thinking of humanity as fallen, or in any sense as being really in serious need of redemption and an uplifting Grace. Their idea of mankind is a picture showing all the natural facts of life, but with the Fall entirely painted out. Their views are summed up in such expressions as these: “What you call sin cannot be very wrong, it’s quite natural after all.” “I cannot see why any redemption should have been necessary. The tendency to do wrong is only a matter of being undeveloped.” Thus the fatal deficiency becomes apparent at once. The great fundamental facts of the Fall have been practically wiped out of their mental horizon. With the loss of these facts, the truth of Christianity must become unintelligible, or at lest extremely visionary.
Charles Wykeham Formby—An early twentieth-century writer, the Reverend Formby was the author of Education and Modern Secularism, Re-creation, and The Soul of England.
Orthodoxy
To the Buddhist or the eastern fatalist existence is a science or a plan, which must end up in a certain way. But to a Christian existence is a story, which may end up in any way. In a thrilling novel (that purely Christian product) the hero is not eaten by cannibals; but it is essential to the existence of the thrill that he might be eaten by cannibals. The hero must (so to speak) be an eatable hero. So Christian morals have always said to the man, not that he would lose his soul, but that he must take care that he didn’t. In Christian morals, in short, it is wicked to call a man “damned”: but it is strictly religious and philosophic to call him damnable.
All Christianity concentrates on the man at the cross-roads. The vast and shallow philosophies, the huge syntheses of humbug, all talk about ages and evolution and ultimate developments. The true philosophy is concerned with the instant. Will a man take this road or that?—that is the only thing to think about, if you enjoy thinking. The aeons are easy enough to think about, any one can think about them. The instant is really awful: and it is because our religion has intensely felt the instant, that it has in literature dealt much with battle and in theology dealt much with hell. It is full of danger, like a boy’s book: it is at an immortal crisis. There is a great deal of real similarity between popular fiction and the religion of the western people. If you say that popular fiction is vulgar and tawdry, you only say what the dreary and well-informed say also about the images in the Catholic churches. Life (according to the faith) is very like a serial story in a magazine: life ends with the promise (or menace) “to be continued in our next.” Also, with a noble vulgarity, life imitates the serial and leaves off at the exciting moment. For death is distinctly an exciting moment.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)—Roman Catholic artist, poet, journalist, essayist, and author, Chesterton wrote over one hundred books. C. S. Lewis says, in Surprised by Joy, that Chesterton’s Christian apologetics had a marked impact on him, and Lewis’s own apologetic work owes a debt to Chesterton.
Lord, I Believe
Our creed shows us the truth of things, but when shall we attend to the truth it shows? The life of the world is a strong conspiracy not of silence only but of blindness concerning the side of things which faith reveals. We were born into the conspiracy and reared in it, it is our second nature, and the Christianity into which we are baptized makes little headway against it during the most part of our waking hours. But if we go into our room and shut the door, by main force stop the wheel of worldly care from turning in our head, and simply recollect; without either vision or love barely recall the creed, and re-describe a corner of our world in the light of it; then we have done something towards using and possessing a truth which Jesus died to tell, and rose to be.… Prayer is the active use or exercise of faith; and the creed defines the contours of that world on which faith trains her eyes. These statements are, or ought to be, platitudes. No dogma deserves its place unless it is prayable, and no Christian deserves his dogmas who does not pray them.
Austin Farrer (1904–1968)—Doctor of Divinity and fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, and later warden of Keble College, Oxford, Austin Farrer was a member of the Inklings, a literary discussion group that included C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. Farrer was one of the witnesses at the civil marriage ceremony of C. S. Lewis and Joy Davidman, and he preached the sermon at Joy’s funeral.
The Everlasting Man
Polytheism fades away at its fringes into fairy-tales or barbaric memories; it is not a thing like monotheism as held by serious monotheists. Again it does satisfy the need to cry out on some uplifted name or some noble memory in moments that are themselves noble and uplifted; such as the birth of a child or the saving of a city. But the name was so used by many to whom it was only a name. Finally it did satisfy, or rather it partially satisfied, a thing very deep in humanity indeed; the idea of surrendering something as the portion of the unknown powers; of pouring out wine upon the ground, of throwing a ring into the sea; in a word, of sacrifice. It is the wise and worthy idea of not taking our advantage to the full; of putting something in the other balance to ballast our dubious pride, of paying tithes to nature for our land. This deep truth of the danger of insolence, or being too big for our boots, runs through all the great Greek tragedies and makes them great. But it runs side by side with an almost cryptic agnosticism about the real nature of the gods to be propitiated. Where that gesture of surrender is most magnificent, as among the great Greeks, there is really much more idea that the man will be the better for losing the ox than that the god will be the better for getting it. It is said that in its grosser forms there are often actions grotesquely suggestive of the god really eating the sacrifice. But this fact is falsified by the error that I put first in this note on mythology. It is misunderstanding the psychology of day-dreams. A child pretending there is a goblin in a hollow tree will do a crude and material thing, like leaving a piece of cake for him. A poet might do a more dignified and elegant thing, like bringing to the god fruits as well as flowers. But the degree of seriousness in both acts may be the same or it may vary in almost any degree. The crude fancy is no more a creed than the ideal fancy is a creed. Certainly the pagan does not disbelieve like an atheist, any more than he believes like a Christian. He feels the presence of powers about which he guesses and invents. St. Paul said that the Greeks had one altar to an unknown god. But in truth all their gods were unknown gods. And the real break in history did come when St. Paul declared to them whom they had ignorantly worshipped.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)—Roman Catholic artist, poet, journalist, essayist, and author, Chesterton wrote over one hundred books. C. S. Lewis says, in Surprised by Joy, that Chesterton’s Christian apologetics had a marked impact on him, and Lewis’s own apologetic work owes a debt to Chesterton.
Selected Letters
To William Drummond
Sir
I did not expect to hear that it could be, in an assembly convened for the propagation of Christian knowledge, a question whether any nation uninstructed in religion should receive instruction; or whether that instruction should be imparted to them by a translation of the holy books in to their own language. If obedience to the will of God be necessary to happiness, and knowledge of his will be necessary to obedience, I know not how he that withholds this knowledge, or delays it, can be said to love his neighbor as himself. He that voluntarily continues ignorance, is guilty of all the crimes which ignorance produces; as to him that should extinguish the tapers of a light-house, might justly be imputed the calamities of shipwrecks. Christianity is the highest perfection of humanity; and as no man is good but as he wishes the good of others, no man can be good in the highest degree who wishes not to others the largest measures of the greatest good. To omit for a year, or for a day, the most efficacious method of advancing Christianity, in compliance with any purposes that terminate on this side of the grave, is a crime of which I know not that the world has yet had an example, except in the practice of the planters of America, a race of mortals whom, I suppose, no other man wishes to resemble.
The Papists have, indeed, denied to the laity the use of the Bible; but this prohibition, in few places now very rigorously enforced, is defended by arguments, which have for their foundation the care of souls. To obscure, upon motives merely political, the light of revelation, is a practice reserved for the reformed; and, surely, the blackest midnight of popery is meridian sunshine to such a reformation.
Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)—A lexicographer and literary critic, Johnson is considered by some, including Malcolm Muggeridge, to be among the greatest Englishmen of letters. Nevill Coghill compared C. S. Lewis to Samuel Johnson in terms of his physical stature and his scholarship and wit.
Orthodoxy
Paganism declared that virtue was in a balance; Christianity declared it was in a conflict: the collision of two passions apparently opposite. Of course they were not really inconsistent; but they were such that it was hard to hold simultaneously. Let us follow for a moment the clue of the martyr and the suicide; and take the case of courage. No quality has ever so much addled the brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages. Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. “He that will lose his life, the same shall save it,” is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide or a drill book. This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or quite brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if he will risk it on the precipice.
He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so. But Christianity has done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the sake of dying. And it has held up ever since above the European lances the banner of the mystery of chivalry: the Christian courage, which is a disdain of death; not the Chinese courage, which is a disdain of life.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)—Roman Catholic artist, poet, journalist, essayist, and author, Chesterton wrote over one hundred books. C. S. Lewis says, in Surprised by Joy, that Chesterton’s Christian apologetics had a marked impact on him, and Lewis’s own apologetic work owes a debt to Chesterton.
Selected Works
With respect to eternity and time, we say that each of these is different from the other, and that one of them indeed is conversant with a perpetual nature, but the other about that which is generated. We also think that we have a certain clear perception of these in our souls spontaneously, and, as it were, from the more collected projections of intellectual conception; always and everywhere calling these by the same appellations. When, however, we endeavor to accede to the inspection of these, and to approach as it were nearer to them, again we are involved in doubt, admitting some of the decisions of the ancients about these, and rejecting others, and perhaps receiving differently the same decisions. Resting also in these, and thinking it sufficient if when interrogated we are able to relate the opinion of the ancients concerning time and eternity, we are liberated from any farther investigation about them. It is necessary, therefore, to think that some of the ancient and blessed philosophers have discovered the truth; but it is fit to consider who those are that have obtained it, and after what manner we also may acquire the same knowledge on these subjects.
Plotinus (ca. 203–262)—Greek philosopher Plotinus influenced early Christian thought with his Neoplatonism.
St. Thomas Aquinas
In so far as there was ever a bad break in philosophical history, it was not before St. Thomas, or at the beginning of medieval history; it was after St. Thomas and at the beginning of modern history. The great intellectual tradition that comes down to us from Pythagoras and Plato was never interrupted or lost through such trifles as the sack of Rome, the triumph of Attila or all the barbarian invasions of the Dark Ages. It was only lost after the introduction of printing, the discovery of America, the founding of the Royal Society and all the enlightenment of the Renaissance and the modern world. It was there, if anywhere, that there was lost or impatiently snapped the long thin delicate thread that had descended from distant antiquity; the thread of that unusual human hobby, the habit of thinking. This is proved by the fact that the printed books of this later period largely had to wait for the eighteenth century, or the end of the seventeenth century, to find even the names of the new philosophers. But the decline of the Empire, the Dark Ages and the early Middle Ages, though too much tempted to neglect what was opposed to Platonic philosophy, had never neglected philosophy. In that sense St. Thomas, like most other very original men, has a long and clear pedigree. He himself is constantly referring back to the authorities from St. Augustine to St. Anselm, and from St. Anselm to St. Albert; and even when he differs, he also defers.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)—Roman Catholic artist, poet, journalist, essayist, and author, Chesterton wrote over one hundred books. C. S. Lewis says, in Surprised by Joy, that Chesterton’s Christian apologetics had a marked impact on him, and Lewis’s own apologetic work owes a debt to Chesterton.
Collected Papers
The gap between those spiritual realities and our apparent situation—between the great vision of the Principle and the teacher’s everyday task—generally seems so great that only a steady feeling of the spirit of worship, a habit of delighted and humble adoration of the Perfect, a sturdy spiritual realism, can maintain our contact with the invisible Reality.
A traveler, who lately paid her first visit to Iona, was asked by the old Scottish gardener on her return to the mainland where she had been. When she told him, he said, “Ah! Iona is a very thin place!” She asked him what he meant by a thin place, and he answered, “There’s very little between Iona and the Lord!”
I am far from denying that from our human point of view, some places are a great deal thinner than others: but to the eyes of worship, the whole of the visible world, even its most unlikely patches, is rather thin.
To see the world in that sort of way is an essential part of the Christian outlook; for the Christian is committed to an equal belief in the reality of eternity and the reality of time. In the days that are coming, I am sure that Christianity will have to move out from the churches and chapels—or rather, spread out, far beyond the devotional focus of its life—and justify itself as a complete philosophy of existence; beautifying and enriching all levels of being, physical, social and mental as well as spiritual, telling the truth about God and man, and casting its transfiguring radiance on the whole of that world in which man has to live.
Evelyn Underhill (1875–1941)—Anglican mystic and philosopher of religion, Underhill was the first woman granted lecture status at Oxford University; she was also a fellow of King’s College, London. Underhill authored thirty-nine books on church history and Christian mysticism.
Selections from His English Works
Yet they say further that it is hard to translate the Scripture out of one tongue into another, and specially they say into ours, which they call a tongue vulgar and barbarous.… I never yet heard any reason laid, why it were not convenient to have the Bible translated into the English tongue; but all those reasons, seemed they never so gay and glorious at the first sight, yet when they were well examined, they might in effect, for aught that I can see, as well be laid against the holy writers that wrote the Scripture in the Hebrew tongue, and against the blessed Evangelists that wrote the Scripture in Greek, and against all those in likewise that translated it out of every of those tongues in to Latin, as to their charge that would well and faithfully translate it out of Latin into our English tongue. For as for that our tongue is called barbarous, is but a fantasy. For so is, as every learned man knows, every strange language to others. And if they would call it barren of words, there is no doubt but it is plenteous enough to express our minds in anything whereof one man has used to speak with another. Now as touching the difficulty which a translator finds in expressing well and so surely, but that he shall sometime diminish either of the sentence or of the grace that it bears in the former tongue: that point has lain in their light that have translated the Scripture already either out of Greek into Latin, or out of Hebrew into any of them both, as by many translations which we read already, to them that be learned appears.
Sir Thomas More (1478–1535)—An Oxford scholar, humanist, lawyer, author, and statesman, More resigned from his post as lord chancellor to protest King Henry VIII’s break with the Roman Catholic Church. More was beheaded for his refusal to recognize Henry as the head of the Church of England and was canonized as a Roman Catholic saint in 1935.
On the Place of Gilbert Chesterton in English Letters
Now here we come to the thing of chief value and of chief effect in Gilbert Chesterton’s life and work: his religion. In this department I have a task quite different from the common appreciation of literary style and matter. From a man’s religion (or accepted and certain philosophy) all his actions spring, whether he be conscious of that connection or no. In the case of Gilbert Chesterton, the whole of whose expression and action were the story of a life’s religion, the connection was not only evident to himself but to all around, and even to the general public. That public of modern England has been taught universally that religion is at once a private personal affair and of little external effect. Our public is more agreed upon religion, and less acquainted with its diverse and multitudinous actions, than any other in the modern world; but even so all those who know anything of him, even if it be but his name, are aware of that great accident (or design) whereby he advanced towards the Faith over many years and was ultimately in full communion with it.
He approached the Catholic Church gradually but by a direct road. He first saw the city from afar off, then approached it with interest and at last entered. Few of the great conversions in our history have been so deliberate or so mature. It will be for posterity to judge the magnitude of the event. We are too near it to see it in scale. It may be that England will soon lose what fragment it retains of the Creed which made Europe, and by the survival of which may Europe survive. It may be just the other way: England may be passing through a crisis and turning point in this matter and may be destined to recover by some unexpected return of fate the influence which brought the nation into being and against which the nation has come to stand in so extreme opposition.
These things are of the future and the future is veiled from man.
Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953)—Belloc was born in Paris, studied at Balliol College, Oxford, and became a British subject in 1906. He served in Parliament and then retired to full-time journalism and writing, during which time he edited several publications and wrote over one hundred works, many devoted to Catholic thought. He was a great friend of G. K. Chesterton’s.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)—Roman Catholic artist, poet, journalist, essayist, and author, Chesterton wrote over one hundred books. C. S. Lewis says, in Surprised by Joy, that Chesterton’s Christian apologetics had a marked impact on him, and Lewis’s own apologetic work owes a debt to Chesterton.
Summa Theologiae
It should be urged that human well-being has called for schooling in what God has revealed, in addition to the philosophical researches pursued by human reasoning.
Above all because God destines us for an end beyond the grasp of reason; according to Isaiah, Eye has not seen, O God, without you what you have prepared for them that love you. Now we have to recognize an end before we can stretch out and exert ourselves for it. Hence the necessity for our welfare that divine truths surpassing reason should be signified to us through divine revelation.
We also stand in need of being instructed by divine revelation even in religious matters the human reason is able to investigate. For the rational truth about God would be reached only by few, and even so after a long time and mixed with many mistakes; whereas on knowing this depends our whole welfare, which is in God. In these circumstances, then, it was to prosper the salvation of human beings, and the more widely and less anxiously, that they were provided for by divine revelation about divine things.
These then are the grounds of holding the sacred doctrine which has come to us through revelation beyond the discoveries of the rational sciences.
Hence: 1. Admittedly the reason should not pry into things too high for human knowledge, nevertheless when they are revealed by God they should be welcomed by faith: indeed the passage goes on to say, Many things are shown you above the understanding of men. And on them Christian teaching rests.
Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274)—Roman Catholic saint, theologian, mystic, and scholar, Aquinas was educated by Benedictine monks at Monte Cassino and at the University of Naples. He became a Dominican friar at age seventeen. He is perhaps best known for his major work, the Summa Theologiae.
Orthodoxy
All the towering materialism which dominates the modern mind rests ultimately upon one assumption; a false assumption. It is supposed that if a thing goes on repeating itself it is probably dead; a piece of clockwork. People feel that if the universe was personal it would vary; if the sun were alive it would dance. This is a fallacy even in relation to known fact. For the variation in human affairs is generally brought into them, not by life, but by death; by the dying down or breaking off of their strength or desire. A man varies his movements because of some slight element of failure or fatigue. He gets into an omnibus because he is tired of walking; or he walks because he is tired of sitting still. But if his life and joy were so gigantic that he never tired of going to Islington, he might go to Islington as regularly as the Thames goes to Sheerness. The very speed and ecstasy of his life would have the stillness of death. The sun rises every morning. I do not rise every morning; but the variation is due not to my activity, but to my inaction. Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life. The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)—Roman Catholic artist, poet, journalist, essayist, and author, Chesterton wrote over one hundred books. C. S. Lewis says, in Surprised by Joy, that Chesterton’s Christian apologetics had a marked impact on him, and Lewis’s own apologetic work owes a debt to Chesterton.
The Truth of Christianity
What hope or consolation have we, but what depends upon the truth of the gospel? If these glad tidings should fail us, all fails us. What else gives us assurance of a future felicity? And without that, how wretched and despicable a creature is man; and how low and base are all the transactions and passages of his life, if they be not ennobled by their respects unto that end! Even the blindest infidel that denies the truth of the gospel should easily confess the goodness of its promised happiness; and therefore see cause to wish that it were true, unless as he has brought himself under its terrors.
You see, then, it is the best news that ever came to the ears of man, that is attested to you by the witness within you: it is that which may cause you to live in hope, and peace, and joy; and to die in hope, and peace, and joy while you believingly look to a blessed immortality, and upon your resurrection, as secured in the resurrection of Christ, and his promise of yours. Other men may confess that the truth of this is desirable; but you have the truth of it witnessed in your own hearts: to carry about with you such a witness, is to carry about the matter of continual joy. The same Spirit which is your sanctifier is your comforter, at least, by maintaining in you the grounds and fit matter of consolation. How happy is such a soul that has not only the voice behind him, saying, This is the way, walk in it; but also the witness within him, that this voice is divine, and telling him of the end, which by that way he may attain! No wonder if the life of such a man be as a continual feast, and if he has a peculiar joy, as he has a peculiar testimony, even such as the stranger meddles not with.
Richard Baxter (1615–1691)—Although he was an Anglican chaplain during the English Civil War and chaplain to the king after the Restoration, Richard Baxter left the Church of England at the time of the Act of Uniformity and became a leader of the Nonconformists. Baxter published his views and preached to large audiences, for which he was arrested twice and spent a total of eighteen years in prison. C. S. Lewis took the term “mere Christianity” from Baxter’s The Saint’s Everlasting Rest.
The Everlasting Man
Indeed the Church from its beginnings, and perhaps especially in its beginnings, was not so much a principality as a revolution against the prince of the world. This sense that the world had been conquered by the great usurper, and was in his possession, has been much deplored or derided by those optimists who identify enlightenment with ease. But it was responsible for all that thrill of defiance and a beautiful danger that made the good news seem to be really both good and new. It was in truth against a huge unconscious usurpation that it raised a revolt, and originally so obscure a revolt. Olympus still occupied the sky like a motionless cloud molded into many mighty forms; philosophy still sat in the high places and even on the thrones of the kings, when Christ was born in the cave and Christianity in the catacombs.
In both cases we may remark the same paradox of revolution; the sense of something despised and of something feared. The cave in one aspect is only a hole or corner into which the outcasts are swept like rubbish; yet in the other aspect it is a hiding-place of something valuable which the tyrants are seeking like treasure. In one sense they are there because the inn-keeper would not even remember them, and in another because the king can never forget them. We have already noted that this paradox appeared also in the treatment of the early Church. It was important while it was still insignificant, and certainly while it was still impotent. It was important solely because it was intolerable; and in that sense it is true to say that it was intolerable because it was intolerant. It was resented, because, in its own still and almost secret way, it had declared war. It had risen out of the ground to wreck the heaven and earth of heathenism. It did not try to destroy all that creation of gold and marble; but it contemplated a world without it. It dared to look right through it as though the gold and marble had been glass. Those who charged the Christians with burning down Rome with firebrands were slanderers; but they were at least far nearer to the nature of Christianity than those among the moderns who tell us that the Christians were a sort of ethical society, being martyred in a languid fashion for telling men they had a duty to their neighbors, and only mildly disliked because they were meek and mild.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)—Roman Catholic artist, poet, journalist, essayist, and author, Chesterton wrote over one hundred books. C. S. Lewis says, in Surprised by Joy, that Chesterton’s Christian apologetics had a marked impact on him, and Lewis’s own apologetic work owes a debt to Chesterton.
The Idea of a Christian Society
Our preoccupation with foreign politics during the last few years has induced a surface complacency rather than a consistent attempt at self-examination of conscience. Sometimes we are almost persuaded that we are getting on very nicely, with a reform here and a reform there, and would have been getting on still better, if only foreign governments did not insist upon breaking all the rules and playing what is really a different game. What is more depressing still is the thought that only fear or jealousy of foreign success can alarm us about the health of our own nation; that only through this anxiety can we see such things as depopulation, malnutrition, moral deterioration, the decay of agriculture, as evils at all. And what is worst of all is to advocate Christianity, not because it is true, but because it might be beneficial. Towards the end of 1938 we experienced a wave of revivalism which should teach us that folly is not the prerogative of any one political party or any one religious communion, and that hysteria is not the privilege of the uneducated. The Christianity expressed has been vague, the religious fervor has been a fervor for democracy. It may engender nothing better than a disguised and peculiarly sanctimonious nationalism, accelerating our progress towards the paganism which we say we abhor. To justify Christianity because it provides a foundation of morality, instead of showing the necessity of Christian morality from the truth of Christianity, is a very dangerous inversion; and we may reflect, that a good deal of the attention of totalitarian states has been devoted, with a steadiness of purpose not always found in democracies, to providing their national life with a foundation of morality—the wrong kind perhaps, but a good deal more of it. It is not enthusiasm, but dogma, that differentiates a Christian from a pagan society.
Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888–1965)—Nobel Prize–winning poet and literary critic, Eliot wrote The Waste Land, which challenged and changed the conventions of poetry, much to the dismay of C. S. Lewis. Mutual respect developed between Lewis and Eliot when they later worked together on the Revised Psalter.
Smoke on the Mountain
The religion of Society has in our time become a well-organized worship, with its sociologist priests and its psychiatrist prophets. In that religion, “antisocial behavior” has been substituted for sin, and the “antisocial” man (i.e., the rebellious or merely unconventional man) is at once accused of “mental disturbance”—that is, of wrong thinking or what used to be called heresy. We lock up the heretic and torture him in ingenious ways with electric shocks and psychiatric third degrees, until he abjures his error and consents to serve the common good as we conceive it. And in all this we have the best intentions, as did the Spanish Inquisition. The “common good” may become a moloch to which countless individuals are sacrificed, if we forget that all good is in the love of God, and that God comes first.
There are other beast gods—as many as there are men to invent them. They wrangle in the temple, turning it into a den of thieves, deafening us with their conflicting counsel until we become incapable of acting effectively in any direction. In the end we cannot stay here; we shall choose one master or the other, and be saved or lost. But for the moment the choice is still before us. Let us remember that the complete backslider is always worse off than the man who never started to climb. The ancient polytheist was only a primitive, with a bright future of growth ahead of him. But the modern who whores after strange gods is a decadent, and there is nothing ahead of him but the dust and ashes of a burned-out world. Yet it was not to a primitive age that Christ came, but to one rotten with decay even beyond our own. Perhaps it is only the decadent—the man who has failed to live by the law, and who admits the measure of his failure—for whom the law will really prove a schoolmaster to bring him to Christ. Perhaps it is only the twentieth century self-worshiper who can learn the full meaning of the First Commandment.
Hold to this, and the beast in the heart has no power. The present loses its confusions, the future its terrors, and death itself is but the opening of a door.
“You shall have no other gods before me.”
That is the law of life and happiness and courage. Courage himself, God the Lion, stands beside us to help us live by it. Whatever we desire, whatever we love, whatever we find worth suffering for, will be Dead Sea fruit in our mouths unless we remember that God comes first.
Joy Davidman (1915–1960)—Poet, author, and the wife of C. S. Lewis, Davidman is the mother of David and Douglas Gresham. C. S. Lewis dedicated his novel Till We Have Faces to her and wrote A Grief Observed upon her death.